York Museums Trust Blog

Our curators Isla Gladstone and Stuart Ogilvy have been hard at work piecing together the 100-or-so sections of a giant ichthyosaur fossil in preparation for the re-opening of the Yorkshire Museum.

The massive sea creature, more than 20 feet or six metres long, was a predator in the seas over North Yorkshire during the time of the dinosaurs.
Our ichthyosaur is one of the biggest in Britain and its remains were found in Jurassic rocks near Whitby on the Yorkshire Coast. It is very rare to find one as well-preserved and complete as this one.
Isla and Stuart had to work out exactly how much space the huge fossil would take up and how it should be mounted to display it to its best effect in our new gallery, Extinct – A Way of Life.
Each piece of the huge jigsaw fossil been numbered by curators before them and each will be put back into place yet again when it goes on show.
Before then, the pieces will be sent away to be cleaned up and restored so the impact of this huge beast on visitors is as dramatic as possible. This would have been a beast you would not wanted to have encountered if you were a little fish swimming through the waters of Jurassic Whitby…

Sherri Steel unearths some archive recipes for using up old bread, which are set to be recreated in York Castle Museum’s working kitchen.

Recipe book from about 1930

Crumbs! It’s amazing the amount of food that can be created from a few slices of stale old bread…

I’ve been researching old recipes for some historic cookery demonstrations at the Castle Museum in March (Click here for details).

Avoiding waste does seem to be a topical subject at the moment and many of the recipes I found date from the times of rationing.

Cooking with stale bread didn’t just happen in times of austerity though, and it has been used for many things – toast, puddings, food for invalids. Breadcrumbs were often used in Roman and medieval recipes – a sage stuffing appears in a Roman recipe for baked dormouse!

Here’s some of the recipes we’ll be recreating:

Tart for an Ember Day

There were many recipes for Ember Day tarts. An Ember Day was one of the many days in the year when the church forbade the eating of meat.

This is from The Forme of Cury, c1390, a cookbook compiled around 1390 by the master-cooks of King Richard II:

Tart in ymber day: take and parboile onynons; presse out the water & hewe hem smale; take brede & bray it in a mortar, and temper it up with ayren; do perto butter, ineon, spice and salt and corans & a ltel sugar with powdor douce, and bake it in a trap,& serve it forth.

Which when translated means: Take and parboil onions; press out the water and chop them small; take bread and grind it in a mortar, and mix it with eggs; add butter to this, and saffron, salt, currents and a little sugar with sweet powder; bake it in a pie shell (or oven dish) and serve it forth.

Bread Pudding

Puddings also use up stale bread e.g. summer pudding or the traditional bread pudding.

This recipe uses breadcrumbs and is from The House-keeper’s Pocket-book, and Compleat Family Cook, by Mrs Sarah Harrison, 6^th edition, 1755.

To a pint of Cream put in a Quarter of a Pound of Butter, set it on the Fire, and keep it stirring; the Butter being melted, put in as much grated Manchet as will make it pretty light, a Nutmeg, or something else, and as much Sugar as you please, three or four Eggs, and a little Salt; mix all well together, butter a dish, put it in, and bake it half an Hour.

Toast sandwiches

And finally, here is an example of toast being used to feed invalids, in the belief it was easier on the stomach than freshly-baked bread.

This recipe is from Housekeeping Book, Edited by Mary Jewry, c.1890.

Ingredients: Thin cold toast, thin slices of bread and butter, pepper and salt to taste. Mode: Place a very thin piece of cold toast between 2 slices of thin bread-and-butter in the form of a sandwich, adding a seasoning of pepper and salt. This sandwich may be varied by adding a little pulled meat, or very fine slices of cold meat to the toast, and in any of these forms will be found very tempting to the appetite of an invalid.

Here’s a glimpse of some of the Yorkshire Museum’s galleries before and after our building work began…

Work is well underway on transforming the  museum in time for our re-opening on 1 August, 2010, when we’ll have five fantastic new galleries.

For those familiar with the building, the difference is already striking. Not only have all the cases and displays gone, but internal walls have been torn down and covers taken off hidden windows, letting in daylight and giving the place a feeling of being much more spacious.

Behind-the-scenes shots of a press event at the British Museum.  It was the launch of the new exhibition ‘Treasures From Medieval York: England’s Other Capital’

All of the treasures are from our own Yorkshire Museum collection.  It’s the first time the BM has displayed another museum’s collection in this way.  Very exciting.

Victoria Adams, a newly-arrived archaeologist at the Yorkshire Museum, describes what it was like to be on the scene when a skeleton was found by builders…

It is claimed that you can’t dig a hole in York without disturbing archaeology, and that certainly seemed true recently when human remains were unearthed beneath the foundations of the Yorkshire Museum.

Contractors were excavating a drain as part of the museum redevelopments, when they uncovered part of a human jawbone and cranium.  A watching brief was in place, so archaeologists quickly came on the scene to record the exact location and relative position of the bones. The remains were then removed to a safe location, allowing the contractors to continue work.

I was asked along to ‘hold the end of the tape-measure’ and accurately plot the find-site, for what we thought was just a few pieces of bone. Excavating a bit lower, more of the skull was unearthed, then the ball of the hip bone amongst the skull fragments, so we concluded that the skeleton was disarticulated, or jumbled up.  Lower still though we found the arms, ribs, and spinal column all in situ, with a large Victorian pipe cutting across where the pelvis and legs should have been. It appears that the historical builders were somewhat unconscientious, and on discovering human bones just threw them out of the way!

The skeleton may be that of a medieval Christian, as it was deliberately laid out to face east in the eventuality of waking up on Judgement Day. If so, he or she is likely to be associated with St Mary’s Abbey, the ruins of which surround and continue under the museum.

However to add to the intrigue, large fragments of Roman ceramics were found immediately above and below the bones. These may have been disturbed when the grave was dug in medieval times. Or this may be Roman grave, Christian or otherwise!

An osteoarchaeologist is currently examining the bones to determine age, gender and any other information about the individual’s life and death.  If the pathology is interesting then they may be carbon14 tested, to accurately determine the age of the bones. Eventually the skeleton will be respectfully reburied.

Does the Yorkshire Museum have any other skeletons hidden in the water-closet?! Quite probably, as many people were buried in the church and grounds of the medieval abbey.  Excavation destroys archaeological contexts, and analytical processes are continually developing, so it is better to leave sites undisturbed if possible.

So yes, it is quite likely that more bodies will come to light in the future. That’s certainly something to think about as you eat your picnic in the Museum Gardens.